Former First Lady of the United States, Melania Trump, has attempted to get into the cryptoart market. Unfortunately, for her, Trump's lofty NFT plans have fallen flat on its face in an unsurprising turn.
Melania Trump NFTs fail to rally a crowd
In December, Melania Trump formally announced her own NFT platform. The platform launched with a watercolour piece of the former First Lady's eyes by Marc-Antoine Coulon, dubbed “Melania's Vision”.
While the artwork is certainly more artistic than most typical NFTs — Bored Ape, Weird Whales, etc — the piece was not met with much enthusiasm. Like, at all. However, the cryptoart line still made its way to auction.
Via CNN, the NFT line was sold as part of a two-week auction. Titled “The Head of State”, the collection featured: a hat that Trump wore to visit President of France Emmanuel Macron; a painting of the former First Lady wearing the hat; and an NFT of the hat-Trump painting complete with animation.
This first auctioned collection started bidding at $250,000. Of course, the Former First Lady expected the collection to far exceed that amount by bidding’s close. Well, that didn't happen.
Instead, bidding closed far before Melania Trump’s expectations. Instead of pushing above $250,000, the auction closed at $170,000. While still a lot of money, it's still $80,000 less than starting price. If this was Bargain Hunt, that would've been a colossal failure!
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Trump vs Cryptocurrency
The Melania Trump NFT collection may have bombed due to the way in which bidders were expected to buy into items. Instead of customers using Ethereum, which is pretty much the go-to currency for NFTs, Trump mandated the use of Solana.
The failure of Trump’s auction can be held to this currency. While the bid did hit a required selling price of 1,800 Solana tokens, the current crypto dive cut the token’s value by 40%.
So, while the auction would've been passable, the current volatility of Trump’s backed currency was her downfall.